


Nothing You Can Name

by togina



Series: Nothing You Can Name [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Unrequited Love, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-10
Updated: 2012-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 21:55:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sgt. Barnes and his unit are in Italy, making camp and waiting for orders. Conversation turns to the girls they've left behind, and Bucky's thoughts turn to someone else left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing You Can Name

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for the numerous things I've probably gotten wrong both from the comics and from the era. Slang, surnames, and spelling are all up for critique. This is set (shortly) before Bucky's capture, so it's after the serum but before Bucky knows about it. Bucky is all movie-verse, but Steve is partly from the comics: sickly, but not short. And yes, I stole the title from a South Pacific song.  
> ~*~

“Did you guys see those Italian mommas today? They rationing clothes here, now?” Corporal Martin gave an appreciative whistle, and Jones chuckled as he poked at their smoldering fire, which sputtered and refused to burn.

 

“Why don't you chuck the K-rats in – they taste like rocket fuel, maybe they'll burn like it.”

 

“This is our dinner!” Klepper shot back, brandishing the issued wooden spoon he was using to stir several tins of Army issue into smoked, lumpy gruel.

 

“I'm trying to talk about dames here, and you boys want to talk about dextrose tablets!” Martin sounded wounded, but he ate the lump of meal that his subordinate flicked at him. “Klep', I think you mixed the bouillon tube with the lemon powder.” Bucky pulled his cap down over his face to keep out the smoke from the wet wood and let them bicker. They had finally secured their objective early that morning – towns were just black marker over typeface, but Sergeant Barnes could draw you a map of Italy dotted in Operations – and the German bombers had headed back over the line. High command was even letting loose a little, granting permission for fires and promising them downtime. Of course, if Bucky went a mile for every day of leave he'd been promised, he'd be in New York. Downtime meant a few days of sleeping late in foxholes, waiting to be told where you were going to be shot at next.

 

“They sure were keen,” Esposito chimed in, still sounding like he wasn't old enough to shave. The mustache he said he was growing only made it clear that his mouth was still too wide for his face – and too big for his pay grade. “Bet they're looking for a real, Italian boy.”

 

“Well, you're halfway there,” Jones allowed, “but Queens is a mighty long way from Italy.”

 

“You chum!” Martin, again. “They've got Eye-talian boys by the dozen. They need some good, old-fashioned, American -”

 

“- meat substitute.” Klepper's face was straight and he was holding out the pot with their supper. “And maybe some chicken product.” He started trying to ladle it out with the wooden spoon before giving up and just pouring it down the line of bowls like slop in a trough.

 

“Wasn't thinking we'd _substitute_ anything,” Martin shot back.

 

Dawkins – they'd picked him up after the Krauts had blown half the 107th to kingdom come, poor kid from Alabama – stared mournfully into his bowl. “Doan' talk about chicken,” he groaned. “My mama -”

 

“- makes the best fried chicken in three counties.” Lieutenant Parkinson rolled his eyes. “You've told us all about your mother, Dawkins. Except maybe the parts Martin would be interested in.” Technically Parkinson outranked a sergeant, but he was one of the last of the silk-stocking 107th, all preparatory school and embroidered handkerchiefs and no desire to lead men into battle. But then, Bucky's promotions had come up with the rations, a way to fill the empty spot in the chow line. There was the corporal who got chopped their first week in Europe, and the staff sergeant that bled out all over Bucky's coat when a church wasn't abandoned after all, fool that tried to walk right in. Dragging him back to camp had drenched Bucky in blood that stayed under his nails for weeks, though he'd spent an hour in a freezing lake trying to scrub it away. They gave him a medal for that one, which only made him think the Army must value their corpses more than they did their men.

 

The boy from Alabama had spilled his dinner trying to punch Parkinson. It was a good thing the lieutenant had the same attitude to fisticuffs as he did to war: he ducked, handed Dawkins his own bowl, and patted the red-faced young man on one scrawny shoulder. “Don't worry, Private, I'm certain your mama's fried chicken would be wasted on our corporal.” It was too dark for Dawkins to see the smirk loitering at the edges of his officer's mouth, and the muscle under Bucky's eye stopped twitching. It had never used to do that, in New York.

 

“Hey, wasn't there that girl who gave Martin the check and then paid Leonards in cash?” Morita's voice was soft, but the wayward cheek muscle still leapt to attention. Leonards had gotten chopped three days ago: a sweet, milk-faced kid from the Heights whose mother always sent extra socks. It had been pretty bad; Bucky had found a hand and Klepper had vomited all over what was left of the chest. Klepper and Leonards had signed up together, as soon as Leonards had turned eighteen. Too soft for the war, anyhow, would have been better if he'd left the kid behind in New York like -

 

“I let him have that girl!” Martin protested, met with disbelieving laughter and a few catcalls. “I mean, who wants a dame you don't need two hands for?”

 

“You watch those loose lips, you fat-head,” Morita shot back. “My girl's skinnier than a string bean, but she knows undercover operations they don't have in the handbook.”

 

“Can we use her to win the war?” Parkinson suggested, tone dry enough for kindling.

 

“She the one that tries to send the cookies?” Klepper wondered, looking up from the furrow he'd scuffed in the dirt. Bucky scrubbed a hand through his lank hair and didn't look at the circles under the private's eyes or the red rimming them. _How am I going to tell his ma, Sarge? It wasn't – I don't – he_ can't _be dead, Sarge, he can't_.

 

The squad chuckled. Morita's packages were the stuff of legend in the 107th: cookies pummeled into powder by the Army mail, cakes flattened and then dissected for suspicious materials, socks and underwear that hadn't shown up for eight months because some private off Japan had the same name. Jones and Morita had been separated from their regiments at least four operations ago, and the 107th was too short on men to care about Army segregation. As Parkinson had said, they'd have taken a church organ if it could shoot straight, and Jones sure had better pipes.

 

“That's her.” Morita nodded. “Mabel. Smallest girl in the neighborhood. Hair like an oil spill. But you should see this girl go. She's building airplanes now. Types these letters to newspapers about the war. Has all these ideas.” Morita shook his head appreciatively, then seemed to realize that everyone was staring at him. “What? I'm not the only one here with a dame, am I? Least Mabel ain't one of Martin's fantasies.”

 

“I've got a woman!”

 

“Sarge is a looker, Martin, but he ain't no dame.” Klepper's voice shook a little, enough to keep his sergeant from decking him. Instead Bucky smirked and stole Martin's smoke, blowing the corporal a kiss.

 

“A real woman – no offense, Barnes. I doubt you run in the same circles.” Considering how broad-minded the corporal seemed to be about his escorts, Bucky wasn't so sure.

 

“Mary Margaret.”

 

“What is she, a nun?” Dawkins was going to get himself killed one of these days, Bucky mused, filching the rest of the pack from Martin's bag when he moved to tackle the private. The Reich's eagle glared back at him, along with some letters that might have been German or French or Russian for all he knew.

 

“She's a nurse. Hell of a girl – met her over in England, after I got shot.”

 

“You got shot in England?” Jones sounded scandalized. It was too dark to see if Martin was blushing or not, and Bucky startled himself by smiling at the memory.

 

“How else do you meet a nurse?” Parkinson explained, and Jones snorted.

 

“Anyway.” The corporal's voice was a study in nonchalance. “Mary Margaret. Legs longer than a fawn's, voice like a fine whiskey -”

 

“-face like an angel.” Esposito yawned. “This is the same girl you met last week, and she sounds like the one you left in Brooklyn, too.”

 

Martin had learned to ignore them all several operations ago, and was undeterred. “She makes collages. Clips things out of the magazines and glues them all together. They're like whole worlds: movie stars and limousines and fancy mansions scattered all over her room.”

 

“So you've seen her room?” Morita grinned, and Martin felt for cigarettes he no longer had. Bucky took pity on him and gave him one, along with a lighter. “Now that's a different sort of bedtime story – hey, Sarge! This is my lighter!” No one looked very surprised, but then they'd all had time to accustom themselves to losing things like cigarettes and having them replaced with compressed graham biscuits or premixed cereal.

 

“Didn't you read the manual? A good soldier keeps track of his gear.” Parkinson lifted his chin and imitated the colonel that had given them the same speech, along with a lot about bivouacking formation and drills and pitching tents in dry places. “And if you want a story about a girl, I've got one.” Now there was a dame that probably didn't run in Bucky's circles, unless her taxi took a wrong turn on the way to the gala. “Thomasina Maribelle Celia Johnson.”

 

“That's her name?” Klepper sounded horrified, but Esposito nodded knowingly.

 

“Well,” the lieutenant allowed, “we call her Tom. She's the heir to the Johnson estate, though her father keeps threatening to disown her. I met her -”

 

“- when she lost her glass shoe at a ball and you returned it to her?” offered Jones. In the firelight, Parkinson did look a bit like Prince Charming, if the prince hadn't shaved in over a week, or taken a bath in at least two.

 

“ . . .when her shoe fell out of a tree and caught me on the head. But we were at a dance.”

 

“There were trees at the dance?” Klepper looked like he was imagining a ball in Central Park, and Dawkins seemed to be contemplating some sort of barnyard festival that Bucky was certain involved farmers' daughters and fried chicken.

 

“Well, the courtyard,” the lieutenant allowed. “She was avoiding the exiled prince of some Greek island.”

 

“She was wearing a dress, right?” Parkinson nodded, and Martin's teeth flashed in the firelight. “And up a tree?” The only answer to that was a cultured chuckle, and the corporal's jaw went slack. Bucky took the moment to scratch at his stubble, hoping there would be time and light to shave the next day. He never could have left it so long in New York – he might wake up with a razor and soap near his throat, accompanied by asthmatic wheezing about living with a bum.

 

“Her father wants her to get married to someone to fill his shoes – but Tom wants to run the company herself. She's taking all of these classes at university. She taught one last semester, until he found out and threatened to shut them down on anti-American charges.” The voice stayed smooth, but there was steel underneath the silk that the sergeant had only heard once before, after burying most of their unit in the remains of a minefield the command hadn't bothered to mention.

 

“People can do that?” Klepper sounded surprised, but his expression changed when Jones made a noise almost too soft to be heard. It was the same noise he made when they talked about Operation Say Your Prayers, known to the brass as Operation Cellophane. Bucky stopped sending letters home after Cellophane, because there were people who still believed that the government stood proud like some statue in a harbor, and all he could see were his men marching into a massacre. Apparently the massacre was to distract the Nazis from the troops curling around the other side of the country, but the commander could have made that up to keep them from shooting him. Jones had walked into the hail of bullets the same way Bucky imagined he walked onto buses, dark eyes hard and fingernails white against chocolate skin.

 

“Cut all her hair off, too,” Parkinson went on, the susurration of his voice oil on a stormy sea. Jones' jaw eased, and Ewling chewed the side of his thumb quietly, but he no longer looked shaky. Cellophane had hit Ewling like pneumonia hit Bucky's apartment every winter, and it was hard to know what would send the man back into it. His jaw was still purple from where Barnes had slugged him to stop the screaming two nights before. “Looks like some flapper from the twenties.”

 

“What about you, Expo? Got a dame?” Morita nudged Esposito, who startled and lurched sideways off the log they were sharing. He happened to knock his pack near enough for Bucky to relieve him of his father's pocket watch and slip it into Klepper's coat. It was his job to look after the men, after all, and the USO was never going to come. Someone had to keep them entertained; well, besides Martin.

 

“Maria!” the whole camp chorused, and Esposito flushed.

 

“How'd you know?” he demanded, and Bucky wiggled a tinted picture of a swarthy girl with remarkably red lips and eyes bluer than her mother had probably ever imagined. Eyes that color belonged with blonde hair that was always flopping into them, brushed off by fingers stained with charcoals and paints. The private lunged for it, surprised when his sergeant practically threw it at him. “All right, all right. So her name's Maria. It's a good name.”

 

“Good enough for every other girl in Queens,” Martin supported, patting Esposito on the shoulder.

 

“She – her parents said we couldn't get hitched 'til I get home.” And there was Leonards sitting by the fire, Klepper's arm around his shoulder while he gushed about the girl waiting for him, the plumbing business they were going to run, the dog he was going to buy for his future kids: a boy and two girls. Leonards' hand and his headless torso and the vomit dribbling from Klepper's chin.

 

Bucky pinched his arm until he was certain it would bruise, and replaced the cigarette behind Jones' ear with a purple flower. “She's graduating this June. Wants to raise a whole bunch of kids. Makes the best lasagna in the world. You can smell it from blocks away.” Morita caught Martin in the ribs with an elbow, so no one mentioned that Esposito's Maria was unlikely to be the only girl – or the only Maria – making lasagna in Queens. “Her hair goes down to her hips, and when she walks it catches on . . .” He trailed off, and there was a moment of appreciative silence.

 

After awhile Dawkins began, the acne on his chin tinted orange as he drew out words into the form of some gal named Sue Ellen who once knocked a man flat with a skillet and made the best biscuits in three counties – excepting his mother's. Jones followed him, melodic voice soft as he spoke of Laura: the languages she knew, the riddles she told, the mysteries she embodied. Then Ewling, fingers pressed hard to his thighs to keep them still, his girl all spun sugar and lace. Klepper was barely audible, but he was speaking, and Bucky let the sound of it rub over his shoulders like distant, paint-smeared hands. Finally, it was quiet, and they all watched the fire dance: plump flames and skinny ones, flirting with the toes of their boots. The fire burned low and steady, and sparks flew with the sap from the wood.

 

“What about Sarge?” someone said, and the focus went from the fire to the man stretched out beside it, his legs crossed at the ankle and his boot-soles nearly alight. Bucky's face was invisible, so far from the flames.

 

“Yeah, Barnes,” Martin chimed in. “We've never heard about your broad.”

 

“Bet she's something.” That was Klepper, who had spent long enough with them to know that his sergeant's shit was the same color as theirs, but never seemed to remember it. “She's a looker, right?”

 

“'Course she is. You think Sarge would settle for some dumb dame?” Esposito, who made Bucky feel old at nineteen.

 

“She working in one of the plants now?” Morita was probably thinking of his own girl, and Barnes' lips lifted in amusement at the thought of thin fingers and bony limbs subsumed by a greasy jumpsuit.

 

“Not a chance,” Parkinson answered dismissively. “She'll have too much flair for that. I'd say an artist.”

 

The Italian night fell in moonlit patterns through the trees, everything in shadow like charcoal lines on paper Bucky brought home tucked under his vest, a few sheets at a time so that the store owner wouldn't catch on.

 

“A con artist,” Jones muttered when he reached for his cigarette and grabbed the flower. “And patient, to put up with you, Sergeant Sticky-fingers.” There was the slam of a tenement door, the aggrieved sigh when the smell of meat proved that Bucky had taken their grocery situation into his own hands and empty pockets.

 

“Or very demanding,” the lieutenant countered, aristocratic face soft. He was looking at Thomasina, Bucky knew, so he let himself watch the fire for a thin, bloody mouth insisting it could fight its own fights.

 

“Tall,” Ewling suggested, cocking his head to look at his supine non-com. “Blue-eyed.” For a man that woke up shrieking as often as not, Ewling was perceptive. Maybe that was part of the problem. Bucky kept his gaze on the fire, flames reflecting in the darkness of his eyes.

 

“Italian.”

 

“No, English.”

 

“French?”

 

“Irish – a redhead, with a temper.” That memory had faded to sepia: an Irish brogue and a woman willing to throw him out on his ear if he didn't wash his hands before he sat at their table. Lullabies interrupted by a cough that echoed through the rooms weeks after the burial; Bucky afraid to sleep for fear it would take her son, too.

 

“He took her out to the movies every week.” Klepper's tone was wistful, but Bucky didn't look at him. None of them save Parkinson had made the kind of money that kept a dame in moving pictures and silk stockings. And no dame would sneak through the back exit in the theater. He could still smell the musty rags and damp concrete, feel the tension in his shoulders as he waited for the opening music to drown out the squeak of the door and the consternation of his accomplice.

 

“Coney Island.” Smoking one of Klepper's cigarettes – he rationed between his men, and it wouldn't do to smoke all of Martin's and leave the man in a foul mood – Barnes remembered thin lips shiny from oyster grease, freckles obscured by sunburn and blonde hair blown straight up by the sea breeze and the Ferris wheel. Coney Island at night, where the noise from the boardwalk covered the way his voice cracked on good-bye.

 

“She writes letters every week.”

 

“C'mon, it's Sarge. At least twice a day.” The men chuckled, then grew quiet at the sound of their petty officer's hand going involuntarily to the pocket on his shirt. They hadn't gotten mail for two weeks, but Bucky had stopped waiting for them to call his name months ago.

 

His last letter had been addressed to Corporal Barnes, and Jones had announced the name with a flourish and a salute. Inside there was an ink drawing of a man in a starry costume, punching a Hitler with remarkable ears. The Hitler Bucky recognized from New York, half-sketched and crumpled on the floor, smudged across a freckled cheek. The masked man was new. He'd given Martin the article that came with it to read aloud, about some performer named Captain America selling war bonds and winning hearts. It didn't make any more sense than it had the first time Bucky puzzled over the words. They'd used the newspaper to start that night's fire, and he'd folded the sketch into the field manual he'd memorized before shipping out.

 

“It's the Army, Sarge.” Morita's voice was loud in the silence. “Your mail's probably with some James Buchanan Barnes out in Hawaii.” He sighed, and chucked a log on the fire. “Bet we need the socks more than he does.”

 

Bucky tossed Parkinson's extra wool socks at him, and the lieutenant made an incredulous noise. “I hid those!” he protested. “There's no way . . .” Ewling actually giggled, and the rest of the men lifted their eyebrows or rolled their eyes. He turned to glare at his subordinate. “Keep stealing my socks, sergeant, and you'll be writing your own reports.”

 

Thankfully, it was an idle threat, but it kept the soldiers entertained long enough for Bucky to rise and chuck their packs at them. He watched them unroll their blankets – Klepper's charred where it had gotten too close to a fire, Ewling's riddled with holes that still gave him nightmares, Martin's actually a quilt they'd found in an abandoned house. They settled down and Bucky wrapped his hands around the cool barrel of his rifle and sat on a rock just past the orange circle of light. Parkinson spared him a questioning glance, but didn't bother to ask who was taking first watch.

 

“I'll take the next one,” Klepper volunteered, Esposito and Jones calling the next two. There was some kicking and grumbling as they spread out, and Martin tried to lay on top of Ewling and Dawkins, arguing they'd stay warmer that way. Morita threw himself out next to Klepper, the empty bedroll only in Bucky's mind. Complaining gave way to snoring and the sound of owls or Nazi scouts, out of range either way. Though he did nearly shoot Martin when the man sat up and put a hand on his knee.

 

“Don't worry, Sarge. I'll bet you've never lost a girl – sure won't lose this one.” Bucky gave him half a smile and waited for the corporal to tumble back to sleep before his mouth tightened. Martin was right, in a way: Bucky wouldn't lose this one. His hand went to his pocket, and he stared into ash-covered embers and wondered about thin lips and freckled cheeks sketched into muscles and star-spangled jumpsuits. He couldn't lose something he'd never had.


End file.
